


The Detective and the Girl with the Sad Eyes

by evgrrl09



Category: Law & Order: Criminal Intent
Genre: Angst, F/M, Ghosts, Personal Demons, Post Season 7 but not necessarily any specific time frame, Romance, Supportive partner, murder investigation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-16
Updated: 2021-02-16
Packaged: 2021-03-18 22:36:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,816
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29497407
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/evgrrl09/pseuds/evgrrl09
Summary: While girls are being hunted in the city, Alex Eames receives a visitor only she can see. As the killings continues, Eames is forced to grapple with forces she never thought could be real. B/A pairing.
Relationships: Alexandra Eames/Robert Goren





	The Detective and the Girl with the Sad Eyes

The Girl with the Sad Eyes and a broken violin appeared to Alex after they found the third body.

Major Case was called in only after the teenage daughter of a prominent Congressional representative was found in the bushes of Central Park. The body was found as all the others had been: posed with her arms across her chest, and wrapped with a shawl in a bed of fresh snow that looks like the silk from the inside of a casket. Her eyes were frozen open, staring at the treetops and wondering why this was her fate. The posing was a classic sign of a man who deluded himself into believing he loved and valued the children he killed. Bobby would have a multitude of profiles and theories to suggest why the bodies were positioned in such a way.

Alex only has one name for the Killer: monster.

As she stands in the dying light of the park, in the grove where the most recent body has been found, Alex catches sight of the Girl with the Sad Eyes and her violin. Eyes just like the ones of the murdered girls. Eyes in mourning. Eyes covered in cloudy glass. She’s not sure how she knows what they look like, considering she’s clear across the grove from her, but it’s an image conjured in her head. Alex feels those eyes before she sees them. Cold fingers trace the length of her neck. Not easily startled, Alex turns to see who might be daring to touch her. (Surely Bobby would know better than to show any signs of affection at a crime scene, no matter how disturbing it was.) But Bobby is several yards behind her, getting details from one of the uniforms. The cold of the weather ceases to be the cold she feels. This is the cold of dread. And Alex does not feel dread for no reason.

That is when Alex sees her. Time stops, swallowing the sounds of the CSU team and the distant traffic from the concrete forest of Manhattan. She gulps hard. Her eyes meet the Girl’s. What is a young girl doing in Central Park with no shoes, no coat, and carrying a weary violin?

Not bothering to tell anyone where she is going, Alex sets off across the clearing to reach the Girl. Every step she takes sends her heart racing faster and faster. The smell of rotting flowers and spun sugar threatens to overwhelm her the closer she gets.

All the while, the Girl with the Sad Eyes and violin stays still. Stays still and stares.

The closer Alex gets to the Girl, the more the Girl seems to fade. Frowning, Alex speeds up. She blames it on blinking, on the impending darkness that is rapidly stripping her of her vision. A trick of the light, that is all it is. The trees close in on the Girl with the Sad Eyes, the inky dark spilling around her, shrouding her in a mothering cocoon. Alex is within feet of the Girl with the Sad Eyes now, at the edge of the bushes that she needs to wade through to reach her. But the closer Alex gets, the more the Girl with the Sad Eyes dissolves into the shadows. A thump -- _bum bum, bum bum --_ shakes Alex’s bones. The thumping slows the closer she gets. Alex is unsure if it’s her heart, or if it’s the Girl’s.

“ _Eames_!”

As if her ears are split open by the screech of an out of tune instrument, Alex whirls at her partner’s call. Sounds return. The cold hit her like a brick to the face. Air returns to her lungs in a _whoosh_. She senses Bobby’s concern, just the way she can always sense his moods. That will have to wait, though.

Alex turns back to where the Girl was only to be greeted with skeleton tree branches and dead leaves. Whipping her head back and forth, craning her neck to try and see better into the dark, Alex’s eyes search desperately for evidence of the Girl with the Sad Eyes and a violin. She stares into the chasm of the trees, as if it holds the answers to what she saw. Is she a witness? The Girl seems roughly the age of the others, has the same vacant expression. Is she someone who might have escaped the murderer’s captivity?

When Alex lets out a breath, the puff of air floats in her face like smoke. The quiet closes in on her, even as she can faintly make out the sound of the CSU team and bystanders behind her.

“Stupid,” Alex mutters to no one, rubbing her forehead.

It is nothing, couldn’t have been. She is just seeing things fueled by the disturbing nature of the crime they are investigating.

With a shake of her head and a hard swallow, Alex sets off across the clearing again, towards her partner and the frozen flesh and blood girl asking the sky, _Why_?

XXXXX

She sees the Girl with the sad eyes again, this time under fluorescent lights and surrounded by people.

“Captain, how long has that little girl been waiting over there?” Alex asks Ross the morning after they are put on the case. Relief surges through her that she really had seen the Girl in the park last night. She wears the white dress. Her dark hair hangs around her face like a curtain. Still at her side is her violin.

Ross looks up over his file and through the windows of his office. He frowns. “Little girl?” He cranes his neck around Alex to see where she is pointing.

Alex turns to look through the windows again. The Girl is gone. Without a moment’s thought as to how frantic she will look, she dashes from the office, through the squadroom, and down the hall. No Girl.

She whirls around wildly to find any trace of her. Several people look at her as if she is one of those New Yorkers who stands on the end of the block with a megaphone and doomsday pamphlets nobody wants.

“Eames?”

Even Bobby’s voice can’t draw her from the confusion. Alex pauses, stopping her scan of the hall to look at her partner. He has followed her from their desks, eyebrow arched. She can only imagine what her face looks like. Her heart thumps far too fast in her chest. The cold of dread returns to settle over her like a fog.

Swallowing hard, Alex takes one last look around for a Girl and a violin. But there’s no one. She rubs her forehead, pinches the bridge of her nose. Bobby is still watching her with concern when she looks back at him. She suppresses the shudder that threatens to ripple up her spine.

With a tight smile, she shakes her head. “Sorry, I thought...I thought I saw someone come in that I knew from the, er, the Academy.” She strides toward him and returns to their desks. Even as she returns to work though, she can’t shake the feeling that the Girl only she sees is not really a girl at all.

XXXXX

Alex curls into Bobby on their bed. His hands idly trace indistinct patterns on her bare stomach. She buries her face into his shoulder, desperate to ignore the pile of rot festering in her stomach. This case is poison, spreading through her bloodstream until she can hardly stand up without feeling like a piece of rice paper in a storm. All she and Bobby have seen for the past few days are dead girls and grieving parents and sickening theories.

“Tell me what you’re thinking about,” he whispers. His breath is warm against her forehead. She holds him tight. Right then, she needs a life raft, something to cling to and anchor her to reality. She needs the heat of his embrace and the safety it brings with it. Even when she is fraying at the seams from the stress of their job, he tells her she’s the best chance their victims have of getting justice. Alex doesn’t believe him most of the time, but he says it with such earnestness and affection that she can’t help but smile and allow the warmth to bloom through her chest. She needs that warmth now more than ever.

Because right now she sees the Girl, eyes pinned to Alex and standing in the corner of the room. Alex does her best to not look directly at the Girl. She’s been hanging around since they were put on the case earlier in the week, popping up in the oddest of places.

Each time she appears, Alex is the only one who sees her.

As she lays in bed right now, Alex wonders if she should tell Bobby. Of all the people in her life, surely he would be the one to understand. In the corner of the dark room, the Girl’s spectral skin glows in the thin line of street light coming through the blinds. The chill of the Girl’s presence fights an invisible war for dominance with the warmth of Bobby’s skin.

“Do you believe in ghosts?” she murmurs against his chest. She can’t look him in the eye as she asks the question.

She feels his lips quirk into a wry grin against her hairline. “Ghosts?”

It’s not entirely surprising he would find her question amusing; he’s usually the one posing the odd questions. She is the one who believes in what she can see and touch. She puts her faith in the physical evidence, excels at finding it when given his theories based on the killer’s psychology.

“Yeah,” she says. “Any kind of ghost. Angry spirit? Casper? The girl from _The Exorcist_?”

“That last one wasn’t a ghost.”

Alex rolls her eyes and swats his chest. “Answer me.”

Bobby heaves a sigh. His whole chest rises, her head along with it. “I guess, uh, even after people die, they’re never really gone,” he says. “Someone remembers them, has their stories written down or recorded somewhere. Somehow, they’ve made their mark on the world. And for a time, people who knew them are able to keep them alive in their stories. The good memories are what give them peace. Bad memories keep them around in someone’s head, er, haunting them so to speak.” His brief pause makes Alex wonder if he’s thinking of his own ghosts. The way he talks about them now tells Alex he has some occupying his mind. “So, I guess, in that way I believe in them.”

The Girl shifts in the corner, coming closer to Alex’s side of the bed. She brings a chill with her. The agony in her eyes clenches around Alex’s heart, robbing it of beats. With the Girl so close now, Alex can no longer ignore her. The Girl demands her attention, even if she does not say it.

“What happens to the people who had no one?” she asks. “The people who don’t get remembered like that.” Even though she’s asked the question, she loses herself in her own mind in search of an answer. Do the forgotten drift aimlessly through the world when they’re gone, homeless memories in search of someone who can free them?

Bobby’s quiet for a long time. She knows he hasn’t fallen asleep because he doesn’t sleep and because his fingers drift lower and lower to brush the rose soft skin on the inside of her thigh.

“I...I don’t know.” He sighs. “I guess they just fade away.”

Alex’s eyes drift to the Girl. They stare at one another. Something tells her this is a rare occasion where Bobby is wrong about something.

After a moment of complete silence, the radiator kicks on and pierces the air like a sword. Bobby’s large hand cups the side of her face and he pulls her back to face him. His eyes are huge and dark and warm, so unlike the agonizing winter storm that rages in the Girl’s eyes.

“Alex,” he whispers, “what is it?” He’s busted out her first name. He rarely does that. Even after they became lovers, he still calls her Eames. She must really be worrying him.

Instead of answering, Alex leans in and kisses him. She buries her face in his neck, shivers as he runs a hand through her hair. Alex doesn’t know whether it is Bobby’s capable hands or the fact the Girl has vanished, but her muscles relax. Closing her eyes, she lets herself get lost in the gentle waves of ecstasy that wash over her as she opens her legs in invitation. With each gasp, each roll of their hips, Alex loses herself in the one person she knows she can grasp.

Not yet. She can’t tell him quite yet about the Girl with the sad eyes and violin.

XXXXX

“What do you want from me?” Alex asks in the shower one night. She sits on the floor of her tub, knees curled up to her chest so she can sob into them. The Girl sits in the shower beside her. Her violin rests on the tub floor between them. The Girl refuses to leave Alex’s side now, and she has refused to leave since the discovery of a new body. This time it was a girl Alex promised they would protect. She’d been scared, terrified because she was best friends with the prior victim, and knew she had been seeing someone older. She confided in Alex that she worried whoever the older man was would come after her for knowing. But Alex told her she would be safe.

Alex should have known better. The world isn’t safe. Especially for a girl who knew something forbidden.

After eighteen hours with no sleep, the captain sent Alex and Bobby home, not knowing they went to the same home. She could barely keep herself from losing the tight grip on her grief on the ride home. Neither she nor Bobby spoke the entire time, each of them lost in the cacophony of their own thoughts and demons. But once alone and under the steaming water, Alex sank to her knees to choke back the wracking sobs threatening to burst from her chapped lips. The Girl was sitting beside her when she opened her eyes.

“Tell me,” she begs of the Girl. “Tell me what you want!”

This is the first time she's spoken aloud to her companion, fearing she would just be giving into her delusion. She cannot find it in herself to care right now, though. Dead girls and sparkling snowflakes and eyes cloudy with agony have made Alex lose her composure. Maybe even her grasp on her own sanity.

Why else is she seeing the Girl, if not because she is losing her mind?

Meeting the Girl’s sad eyes, Alex sniffles. Her heart chills. “Who are you?”

The Girl with the sad eyes only stares at Alex, and blinks.

XXXXX

Midway through their questioning of friends and family of the victims Alex adds a question about whether or not any of the girls played instruments. She senses Bobby’s confusion at the addition, but he plays along well. It is a question that bears no fruit for the investigation, but the Girl becomes agitated when Alex asks it. She clings to Alex, a layer of spectral dust that cannot be shaken. Up until now, the Girl has been nothing but a canvas splashed with grief and loneliness. When Alex asks about instruments though, the Girl’s image shudders, as if Alex’s simple question has sent ripples through the lands of the living and the dead.

Bobby asks her about the question as she drives through a quiet street after speaking to their most recent victim’s parents.

Keeping her eyes on the road, Alex shrugs. “No reason,” she says. “Just trying to get an idea of their hobbies. Maybe could give us a lead.”

“Why instruments? Seems a bit, ah, a bit _specific_.” She senses he’s testing where he can tread with her.

“Well...it was just a hunch. These girls all seem to be...musical, er, types.”

He knows she’s lying, but she also knows he wants to see where she is going. Despite the great affection he has for her, he can’t control his natural desires to observe human behavior. He wants to find the root of the change, the base of the abnormal actions.

And the way Alex is acting certainly qualifies as abnormal for her. The longer he tries to piece the conundrum she presents to him, the freer she is to find logical reasons for her sudden “theories” she’s been suggesting at the behest of the Girl.

While Bobby studies Alex, her eyes drift up to the rearview mirror. The Girl sits in the back seat, her gaze telling Alex there is more work to be done.


End file.
